


if absolution were your benediction

by enemeriad



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-12 22:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4497867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enemeriad/pseuds/enemeriad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A road trip through Natasha's memories and what, or rather whom, she finds there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if absolution were your benediction

If Natasha is night, Clint is day and if metaphors were any way to describe two of the most enigmatic Agents in S.H.I.E.L.D history, then this would be how:

Sometimes on the days that stretch out like forever, when sundown seems like an eternity away and the stench of death clings to every rasped breath, when the world starts to blur and the mission no longer hinges on any sort of rational plan but a will to live, Natasha will look up to the sky and she will pray.

There is no sentimentality in symbolism for Natasha Alianovna, and gods are just as useless as politics and patriotism.

 

 

Natasha will look to the sky and pray.

Sometimes for ridiculous things like another bullet in her case, for what feels like a broken rib to be the graze of a bullet but mostly, mostly, she will take stock of her sins and pray that she toes the line of absolution. She will pray that even though she exists in moral ambiguity and her name will never be written on walls of valour and that her existence persuades children of monsters, that she will have done enough to pay him back.

And then she will turn away from the light and twist the arm of circumstance and orchestrate miracles for herself because she is the sum of all her parts and all her good and sometimes that is just enough to make it through the night.

 

 

 

They have stood, side by side, against gales of hell-fire and watched cities burn, fought regimes to the ground and patched each other back up with nothing but sheer force of determination. When she looks back at her life, sacrifices and solace, he will cloud the bad in ambiguity.

When he whispers to her that she can never run away from it all, that what she has taken from the earth she has given back two-fold, she will not believe him. But when he stumbles or falters and it is her hand that pulls him up or when she missteps and he yanks her from the darkness, she thinks that maybe she will find forgiveness. 

 

 

 

On the nights, in the cold, atop roofs in hideouts, along rocks in caves when her mind is her own and she is alone, she will recall her sins. She will meditate on the murders that colour her recollection. She can never truly escape her past no matter how many people she saves, how many lives she supplants from misery. When her eyes close she sees an orphanage, burning and the screams of the girls that didn't escape their clutches. 

It isn't an equilibrium, this whole good vs evil thing. Somehow one life does not a death cross off. Because no matter how many times she pulls the shadows away and tells herself she is on the right side of the fence, that her morality is judged by a universalism not of a cause, she still sees Clint, through a scope, stepping back and saying into his comm,  _this one is worth saving._

But was it her? She is not bred of spiritual stock but something inside her resonates with the idea that she is not truly a set of specialisations etched onto a personnel file. She is independent of thought, of value, of decision. She may not iterate morality like Steve but she is  _someone._ There is  _human_ within her. She is capable of it. 

But, was the risk to pull her out on who she is or who she can be? 

 

 

 

Her hands do not spill secrets, she has made sure of it. There are no stories to be found along her form. When she is bested by her body she takes the time to recalibrate for the weakness and to ensure it doesn't happen again. 

But Clint? 

She spends days, weeks, years memorising the planes of damage along his arms, his shoulders, along the ridges of his abdomen. There is not a single part of his body that he has not offered to the work they do. And he has paid in kind for his sacrifice. Scars along scars and he runs out of recollection, can't recall a twisted spur from the jagged nick on top of it. 

He often asks her what is her preoccupation with tracing the atolls of his skins terrible attempts to recover. 

'Human.'

'Sure, but--'

No,  _that_ is it. 

 

 

 

She doesn't know _when_ she fell in love with him. Perhaps because it was something like falling asleep. It was slow and she couldn't pick the feeling apart from loyalty and duty and  _debt_ until there she was, standing over his broken bow in Budapest, glass raining down from a broken car window atop of her and feeling like for every scratch and bruise nothing hurt as much as her goddamn fucking heart. It wasn't the realisation that she loved him, it was the realisation that she had been. The feeling had been there for a while but it punctured her consciousness with such force that she reigned terror through the syndicate for a full week before she found him in a military hospital in Ljubljana. 

She didn't tell him then, not even with his hearing aids out, asleep in a private room. He didn't know she'd visited for weeks after he finally came out of the coma until the Nurse asked him who the redhead staying vigil by his bedside was.

 

 

 

It is perhaps because of their work that  _it_ works. If they had met in different circumstances, along a different path in a parallel universe, perhaps they would never have found that synchronicity that defines them because there never would've been the sort of tests of character. If she had never grown up in the program, if Clint had never been devoid of friend and family. If she had never stumbled onto SHIELDs radar and if Clint had never had to make a captain call. 

But they were. These things  _had_ happened. And so. 

 

 

 

 

They like to pretend, though, when they get a moment to spare, somewhere miraculously on the same day, in the same city, when there is nothing pressing to attend to and they can disappear somewhere to be together. It is so easy then to imagine for a moment - usually as they clear the city skyline into the creeping forest or along a quiet trail - that they are leaving behind 9-5 desk jobs. That when they come home they are bested by workplace politics and not the seedy underbelly of humanity's evil. 

Somewhere along the momentary escape, Clint will ask her what a good name for a dog is and she will tell him that a picket fence has to, at the very least, be painted black, for  _originality._ They will commentate on their imaginary neighbours (' _Jean has spent too much money on that house to divorce David right now?, You know that the Jacksons are just waiting for a chance to rip Meredith to shreds for being such a two-faced lying-')_ and 

They will carefully carve out a life devoid of themselves. The intricacies of Meredith's community politics were clear but their role in this fantasy? It was silently agreed that they were never to be included in the story. And so, while Lucky  _would_ be a great name for a labrador, he would not be their dog. 

And it was not some kind of convoluted masochism but a way to reconcile desires with the way the world was. They  _were_ spies. They  _were_ assassins. They lived in bases and undisclosed locations and sometimes missions just blurred into one another with no conceivable end but rather the promise of home upon completion. How, among that, could they live then?

But Natasha didn't actually mind, and she knew Clint didn't truly yearn for that life. What they wanted, truly, was this. Seven hours of leave, sitting on top of Tioga Pass in Yosemite, his hand tracing circles along her back, rough and still bandaged from a skirmish in Alexandria. 

 

 

 

She learns, or perhaps she just comes to accept, more accurately, that she will never feel vindicated. Perhaps pressing guilt makes her a better tactician within the scope of their operations. Maybe it is what keeps her from leaving. Maybe it doesn't matter what her motivator is. 

Whatever it is, she finds satisfaction doesn't come from paying Clint back for her life or the world back for her recriminations. It comes from the moments in between. Its the dust settling on a city when the fight is over, its the fleeting taste of victory when she finally finishes a job and it is finding a sense of self in the midst of mayhem. It is laying claim to a specific set of actions that drive her. To look back at victory and chart an autonomous path to where she is standing. To say,  _these choices are mine_. Good or bad will always lie in shades but she  _is_ her own. To take, to maim, to save. She  _can_ and she  _does_ without the (miss)guiding hand of whatever organisation is laying claim to her.

Because she will pay and take, even for the actions she did not choose, but from here on out she can say that right or wrong,  _she_ made it. And there is humanity in that.


End file.
